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Johnson eluded federal authorities and is thus one of several people still being sought by a special FBI-police task force tracing the Nyack leads. There are at least four others: Weems, Buck, Anthony Laborde, 31, a B.L.A. member identified by witnesses as a participant in the robbery, and Joanne Chesimard, 34, the charismatic leader of the B.L.A. who escaped from prison in New Jersey two years ago with the help, police suspect, of Laborde, Burns and Buck. Chesimard is not, however, directly implicated in the Brink's heist.
Boston's arrest, on charges of conspiracy in connection with the robbery, was the seventh directly tied to the case. Late last week she was extradited to New York, where the other six had already been arraigned. At the arraignments, conducted under security so heavy that one official described the courtroom as an "armed fortress," several of the suspects complained that police had abused them. Burns' counsel, well-known liberal Attorney William Kunstler, claimed that his client had been beaten, burned with cigars, choked with chains, half-drowned in a toilet and subjected to a few games of Russian roulette. Deputy Police Commissioner Alice McGillion termed the charges "a classic William Kunstler tactic" designed to divert attention from "three cold-blooded killings." Brown, Gilbert, Clark and Boudin are expected to face indictments for the murders within three weeks. Their lawyers, TIME has learned, plan to argue that the Nyack incident was a Government setup devised to frame longtime radicals.
The involvement of the Weather Underground in the Nyack killings is, in several respects, a strange and unsettling departure for the group. Despite their fire bombs and firebrand rhetoric (an early manifesto: "We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mothers' nightmares"), the W.U.O. usually took pains not to spill blood. Emile de Antonio, who made a 1975 movie about the organization, said he admired "the tender loving care with which their bombings were executed. No one was ever hurt, and they were all directed against the symbols of oppression and authority."
Also new was the involvement of the all-white Weather Underground with black radicals. The two factions had not trusted each other in the 1970s. Black organizations, argued the security-obsessed Weathermen, had been successfully penetrated by the FBI, a fate the W.U.O. wanted to a void." We had what we called gut recognition," a former Weatherman told TIME last week. "We checked each other out all the time to make sure that we didn't have a rat in our midst. We were never penetrated."